A link to the book by Thomas Nagel mentioned by Sheldrake in his talk.

http://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361040962&sr=8-1

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of
Nature is Almost Certainly False

Thomas Nagel

Book Description
Publication Date: Sep 6 2012
In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel argues that the widely accepted world
view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem
cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal
bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other
mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely
materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology,
evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of
biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard
materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally
incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of
life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution
cannot be a merely materialist history. An adequate conception of
nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of
materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation
is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology,
cannot be expected to provide one. The book explores these problems
through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with
more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness,
cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the
theory of everything.


Harry

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